2. Conformance Definition

Contents

2.1. Document Conformance
- 2.1.1. Strictly Conforming Documents
2.2. User Agent Conformance

This section is normative.

The keywords "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALL NOT", "SHOULD", "RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and "OPTIONAL" in this document are to be interpreted as described in [RFC2119].

2.1. Document Conformance

This version of XHTML provides a definition of strictly conforming XHTML documents, which are restricted to elements and attributes from the XHTML namespace.

2.1.1. Strictly Conforming Documents

A strictly conforming XHTML 1.2 document is a document that requires only the facilities described as mandatory in this specification. Such a document MUST meet all the following criteria:

The document MUST conform to the constraints expressed in the schemas in Appendix D - XHTML 1.2 Schema and Appendix C - XHTML 1.2 Document Type Definition.
The local part of the root element of the document MUST be html.
The start tag of the root element of the document MUST explicitly contain an xmlns declaration for the XHTML namespace [XMLNS]. The namespace URI for XHTML is defined to be http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml.

The start tag MAY also contain an xsi:schemaLocation attribute that associates this namespace with the XML Schema at the URI http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/SCHEMA/xhtml11.xsd.
Sample root element
```
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en"
      xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
      xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml
                          http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/SCHEMA/xhtml11.xsd"
>
```
The start tag SHOULD contain a version attribute that declares the version of XHTML in use. The version of this version of XHTML is XHTML 1.2.
Documents written using the markup language defined in this specification can be validated using the DTD defined in Appendix A. If a document author wants to faciliate such validation, the document MAY include a DOCTYPE declaration at the top of their document.
For example:
```
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.2//EN"
    "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml11/DTD/xhtml11.dtd">
```
The SYSTEM identifier MAY be modified as appropriate.

Example of an XHTML 1.2 document

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.2//EN"
    "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml11/DTD/xhtml11.dtd">
<html version="XHTML 1.2"
      xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en"
      xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
      xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml
                          http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/SCHEMA/xhtml11.xsd"
>
  <head>
    <title>Virtual Library</title>
  </head>
  <body>
    <p>Moved to <a href="http://example.org/">example.org</a>.</p>
  </body>
</html>

Note that in this example, the XML declaration is included. An XML declaration like the one above is not required in all XML documents. XHTML document authors SHOULD use XML declarations in all their documents. XHTML document authors MUST use an XML declaration when the character encoding of the document is other than the default UTF-8 or UTF-16 and no encoding is specified by a higher-level protocol.

XHTML 1.2 documents SHOULD be labeled with the Internet Media Type "application/xhtml+xml" as defined in [RFC3236]. For further information on using media types with XHTML, see the informative note [XHTMLMIME].

2.2. User Agent Conformance

A conforming user agent MUST meet all user agent conformance requirements defined in [XHTMLMOD].